Friday, December 30, 2016

Indraprastha was the town founded by the Pandava brothers
of Mahabharata fame as their capital. Here, the eldest among them,
Yudhishthira, became the “ruler of righteousness” (dharma-râja). More than three thousand years later, on 22-23
November 2016, the Draupadi Dream Trust held the first Indraprastha Conference
in the National Museum, Delhi. This was part of a larger initiative on
Indraprastha, with an exhibition in the Purana Qila (Old Fort). This
fort itself had been built over the ancient site of Indraprastha, now partly
made visible by archaeological excavations.

Among secularists, there is predictably an attempt to sow
doubt about this. In his 2015 book Where
Stones Speak: Historical Trails in Mehrauli, the First City of Delhi, Rana
Safvi argues that the finds under the Purana Qila have not been established to
be the Pandavas’s city, which was but “mythological”. In particular, they are
claimed not to contain the characteristic Painted Grey Ware, as per the 1954
excavations by India’s top archaeologist BB Lal. However, 62 years later, the
nonagenarian Lal edited the brochure of the present exhibition and, taking into
account several excavations since then (which Safvi feigns to ignore), he
asserts that PGW was indeed found there, and that it was certainly the city of
the Pandavas. Mehrauli was not the oldest part of Delhi, Indraprastha was.

(This repeats two earlier and similar attempts at secularist
deception, involving the very same archaeologist. When Lal discovered the
temple’s pillar-bases underneath the Babri Masjid, the secularists started
nitpicking about his field-notes, when his final report was already in the
public domain and affirmed the existence of the temple remains. And till today,
defenders of the Aryan Invasion Theory keep on citing as proof of the invasion
the identification by the young Lal of the PGW as showing the Aryan invaders on
their way deeper into India, a view that he has long dismissed as immature. As
ought to be well-known, Lal has for decades testified that there is no proof
for this invasion whatsoever, and that Vedic India and the Harappan
civilization were two sides of the same coin. In all the three cases, the
secularists cite an early or even a non-existent position of Lal’s to trump his
well-known mature position.)

Lightning

A prastha is an
open space, a clearing in the forest where you go and settle, a “colony”. Thus,
a vanaprastha, an elderly person who
withdraws from society, is “one who goes and settles in the forest” or “one who
has the forest as his colony”.

The new town was dedicated to Indra. He was the god of the
thunderstorm that puts an end to the oppressive summer heat and opens the rainy
season. That is why among the 12 Vedic solar months or half-seasons, he rules
the first month of the rainy season. As the Rg-Vedic seer Vasishtha says in his
celebrated Hymn of the Frogs, both
the priests and the frogs croak with joy when the first rainstorm breaks: the frogs
because of the advent of water, the priests because of the manifestation of
their god, Indra. Implicitly, the priests’ recitation is humorously likened to
the frogs’ croaking.

He was also the slayer of the dragon Vrtra, a model for all the dragon-slayers in the world, such as
Zeus killing Typhon, or Saint George, or Siegfried, or Beowulf. In Iran, he was
transformed into a demon, but his nickname Verethragna
(Vedic Vrtrahan, “Vrtra-slayer”) then became a popular god
in its own right. There, we have an Indra on the side of both good and evil.

Less poetically and more philosophically, the Atharva-Veda
puts him at the centre of the sophisticated concept of Indrajâla, “Indra’s net”. In this net, a diamond in every knot
reflects every other diamond knot, and thus the whole. The West needed another
four thousand years to develop the similar concept of the “holographic
paradigm”.

In India, Indra’s cult gradually declined after the
Mahabharata age. Originally an embodiment of masculine stength, he becomes the subject
of poetic variations extolling his (and his wife Shachi’s) sexual prowess. Like
his Greek counterpart Zeus, he gets involved in flings on the side, such as
with sage Gautama’s wife Ahilya. While becoming a character of fun, he further
gets disavowed by the Mahabharata hero Krishna. In the famous Govardhan
episode, Krishna lifts a mountain and holds it like an umbrella over the common
people to protect them from the storm, embodiment of Indra’s wrath. This spurs
on the further decline of the Vedic gods and their replacement with the
now-familiar Hindu pantheon. By the time Hindus start building temples in the
last centuries BCE, Indra is no longer worshiped.

However, the Buddha arrived just in time for Indra to
play a role in his career. it was Indra
himself who persuaded the freshly awakened Shakyamuni to start preaching his
newfound path. Buddhist monks then spread the cult of Indra to foreign lands as
far as Japan. Indra’s weapon, the lightning or vajra, became the emblem of instant Enlightenment. The sought-after
“Self-nature” (Chinese zixing) is
present all the time, deep in all of us; but when we embark on the path of
meditation and finally awaken to it, it strikes like lightning.

Dînpanah and the
religion

When the Muslim conquerors incorporated the area into their
capital and built the Old Fort there, it was apparently not a case of “a Hindu
sacred site destroyed to make way for a showpiece of Muslim power”.
Indraprastha had largely fallen in disuse centuries before the conquests,
leaving pride of place to other parts of Delhi. Still, the conquerors were
aware of the site’s past as Indraprastha, for in his Ain-i-Akbari, Moghul chronicler Abu’l Fazl writes that it had been
built on the site of “Indrapat”. There was probably no explicitly communal
angle to it when the Muslim rulers chose the Indraprastha site.

That changed when the second Moghul emperor Humayun decided
to reorganize the area as his own glimpse of paradise, calling it Dînpanah, “refuge of Islam”. Dîn is the general Semitic word for
“justice, righteousness”, even “religion” (roughly, dharma). It was in this sense that the syncretistic emperor Akbar
was to use it when he founded the Dîn-i-Ilâhî,
the “divine religion”. This new religion was meant as a confluence between
Hinduism and Islam, symbolized by Akbar’s newly-founded city of Ilâh-âbâd (“divine city”, wrongly
transcribed by the British as Allahabad)
on the Ganga-Yamuna confluence. But this religion did not exist yet in
Humayun’s time.

Akbar’s usage of Dîn
accorded with its original Semitic meaning once used by the Arab Pagans. But it
deviated from the meaning that Mohammed had conferred on the term during his
rulership in Arabia: specifically the religion of Islam. It is in this more
limited sense that the word came to be used in names like Saifu’d-dîn, “sword of Islam”, and likewise in Humayun’s Dînpanah, “refuge of Islam”. Humayun’s
rulership of Delhi was short-lived, and when he finally recovered it, he found
his Dînpanah in disarray. He did not
get a chance to rebuild it for he died soon after. So, it only had a very
fleeting existence and made no mark at all in Delhi’s long history. By
contrast, the earlier town of Indraprastha had existed for many centuries.

Recently, some well-meaning but illiterate bureaucrat came
up with the idea that Lutyens’ Delhi should be renamed as Dînpanah. However, naming a central neighbourhood of Delhi after a
particular religion might not go down well with the preponderantly
secular-minded population. Probably the bureaucrats who considered naming the
area’s development project Dînpanah
had not considered this because they had not realized the meaning of Dîn. At any rate, the plan was shelved
when they learned of the far better credentials of Indraprastha.

The god

Now, some usual
suspects will object upon hearing anything with the Vedic god Indra in it: “Communal!” They are
mistaken. There is nothing communal about the Holographic Paradigm. There is
nothing communal about sudden Awakening. He is the same stormgod whom we find
the world over: Zeus among the
Greeks, Jupiter among the Romans, Thor among the Vikings (whence Thursday), Marduk in Babylon, Ba’al
in the Levant. Note how Indra is likened to a bull, how Zeus seduced princess
Europa in the shape of a bull, and how Ba’al was famously worshipped as a bull
in the Biblical episode of the Golden Calf.

In fact, in the Golden Calf events, two faces of the
storm-god were in confrontation: not just Ba’al but even Moses’ god Yahweh are
evolutes of essentially the same god. A lesser-known face of the storm-god was
indeed Yahweh among the Midianite
Beduins in northwestern Arabia. Among them, then led by chieftain Jethro, the
fugitive Egyptian prince Moses found asylum. That is when he acquired both a
wife and a new religion. Yes, Yahweh was originally an Arab storm-god, whose
name was misinterpreted by the Bible authors as “He who is”. His name stems
from a verbal root h-w-h also
attested in the Quran, and meaning “to move in the sky”. This is both in the
sense of the storm-wind’s blowing (an image of the palpable though subtle power
of heaven) and of an eagle swooping down to catch its prey (an image of the
sudden whims of destiny).

This Yahweh, this choleric storm-god, was then taken to
Egypt, apparently in the age when some of Pharaoh Akhnaton’s monotheistic
reform was in the air. Next, he led Moses and the Israelites in the legendary
Exodus through the desert. He remained powerful, sovereign and choleric, but
was theologically transformed into the Biblical “jealous god”, who tolerates no
second god beside him. This Yahweh, the sender of prophets, was later to be
embraced by Mohammed under the name Allah, from al-Ilâh, “the god”.

Long live
Indraprastha!

So, everybody can feel happy with the name Indraprastha. No Muslim invader ever
destroyed a temple to Indra, for he had been worshipped before the Hindus even
used idols housed in temples. Indra throwing the lightning (elsewhere “Thor’s
hammer”) is an apt image of a heavenly intervention in earthly affairs.
Everybody naturally considers thunder and lightning to be the prime symbol of
heaven’s unchained might over us. Thus there is nothing communal about this
name, on the contrary: Indra’s thunder-storms are a pan-religious symbol, an
embodiment of the basic unity underlying the plurality of religions.

Indraprastha was
founded as the capital of the Pandavas’ small-time kingdom but the area was
destined by fate to become the capital of the Delhi Sultanate, the Moghul
Empire, Samrat Hemachandra’s short-lived Empire, British India spanning the
whole Subcontinent, and now the Indian Republic. It is a source of pride, and
worth celebrating, that here, the “righteous ruler” once chose to highlight the
great universal ideas personified in Indra. Therefore, the open-minded
Delhiites all agree: Indraprastha amar rahe!

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Audrey Truschke is a Professor of Religious Studies in Stanford,
California, and has gained some fame with her work on the patronage of Sanskrit
by the Moghuls. In order to get that far, she had to toe
the ideologically mandatory line: neither in America nor in India does the
Hindu-baiting establishment allow a dissident to get seriously established in
the academic world. Predictably, we see her elaborating the same positions
already taken by an earlier generation of academics, such as whitewashing
Aurangzeb. Not that this was a hard job for her: one gets the impression that
she is a true believer and really means what she says. Then again, she may have
done an excellent job of creating the desired impression all while secretly
knowing better.

Bullying

Her position in the article “The Right’s problem with
history” (DNA, 26 Oct. 2016) is summed up as: “Unable
to defend a fabricated history of India on scholarly grounds, many foot
soldiers of the Hindu Right have turned to another response: bullying.” It
would be normal to compare secularist historians and their Western dupes with
people of the same rank, namely different-minded historians, in this case
belonging to the “Hindu Right”. These are not exactly numerous, having been
blocked systematically from academe by the single permitted opinion in both
India and America, but they exist. Yet, they and their output are absent from
her paper. From a street bully, I would expect a denunciation of street bullies,
and from an academic a polemic against her own peers.

The photograph accompanying the article tells
it all. If it had been about her own school of history, the picture would have
shown established historians involved in this debate, such as Wendy Doniger or
Sheldon Pollock. But now that the opposition is at issue, it shows a group of
non-historians, not in an airconditioned college hall but in a street
demonstration exercising their freedom of expression. The reader is expected to
recognize them as representatives of the “Hindu Right”, and as “bullies”.

She testifies to verbal attacks she herself
has endured “from members of the Hindu Right”, and which she evaluates as “vicious
personal attacks on the basis of my perceived religion, gender and race”.
Correction: she could have maintained the very same religion, gender and race
and yet never be attacked by those same Hindus (indeed, most Jewish female whites
have never experienced such attacks), if she had not belonged to the “scholars
who work on South Asia” and who have earned a reputation as Hindu-baiters. She
has been attacked on the basis of what she has written, nothing else.

But it is true, and deplorable, that an
uncouth but vocal class of people clothe their denunciations of an ideological
position in foul personal attacks. It so happens that I know her plight very
well, for me too, I receive my share of what some would call “hate mail” when I
express skepticism of beliefs dear to Hindu traditionalists (e.g. the eternity of
Sanskrit, the supernatural origins of the Vedas, the Rama Setu, or the Krishna
Bhakti verses in the Gita). And also when going against the dogmas of her own
school, such as that Muslim rule in India was benign, or that Sanskrit has an
origin of white invaders oppressing black natives. Nothing dangerous, though,
and I doubt her claim of “physical attacks” on Indologists, unless she means
the egg thrown at Wendy Doniger in London.

From the start, Truschke tries to capture the
moral high ground by citing one of her lambasters as tweeting: “Gas this Jew.”
In America, such reference to the Holocaust is absolutely not done, and Indian
secularist circles adopt the same sensitivities once they see these as valid
for the trend-setting West. To the Hindu mainstream, this hyperfocus on
anything associated with the WW2 is not there, and they had no history with
Antisemitism; but still this quote would be unacceptable there, for regardless
of what Jews exactly believe, Hindus tend to respect other faiths.

However, her claim might be correct (not sure
there), for there are indeed some Hindu hotheads who have adopted this kind of
rhetoric. In pre-internet days, they would brew their own conspiracy theories,
but now the access to websites carrying elaborate Western conspiracy theories,
starring the Zionist World Conspiracy, entices them into using this kind of
language. Certainly deplorable, but not at all representative for the “Hindu
Right”: hardly even for its bullies, not for its leaders (both VD Savarkar and
MS Golwalkar described the Jews as role models for loyalty to one’s own roots) and
not at all for the “Hindu Right” scholars whom she is carefully ignoring.

Academic bullying

This
“bullying” had best been compared to the “bullying” on the other side. Like,
for instance, the two attempts by Leftist students to silence me, as a twice scheduled
speaker, at the Madison WI South Asia Conference in 1996 and a private event
preceding it, hosted by Prof. Andrew Sihler. Or the successful protests against
the Dharma Civilization Foundation’s offer to fund a chair at UC Irvine, when
so many US chairs are comfortably being funded by the Saudis.

But on
Truschke’s own side, the dividing line between bullies and academics is not so neat.
Why stoop to street bullying if you have tenure? It is far more effective,
then, to resort to academic bullying. Thus, in their intervention in the
California Textbook Affair, where Hindu parents had sought to edit blatantly
anti-Hindu passages, the explicitly partisan intervening professors even
managed to get themselves recognized as arbiters in the matter. This would have
been unthinkable if those bullies had not been established academics. (And this
I can say eventhough my criticism of the Hindu parents’ positions exists in
cold print.) Her focus on street bullies has the effect of misdirecting the
reader’s attention, away from the more consequential phenomenon of academic
bullying.

I myself have
been barred from several Indologist forums by active intervention or passive
complicity of the same Professors who otherwise clamour “censorship!” when anything
at all happens to a book they favour. Thus, they are so very sensitive that
they dramatically talked of “threats to freedom of speech” when AK Ramanujan's 300 Ramayanas, a book belittling a Hindu
scripture, was not selected as required reading in Delhi University, though
otherwise it remained freely available. They claim to champion “freedom of
speech!” when Wendy Doniger’s error-ridden book Hinduism was withdrawn from circulation, though it was never
legally banned but was left available for another publisher; who did indeed come
forward, so that the book is again lawfully omnipresent. But when I appealed to
them to intervene for annulling my banning from the Religion in South Asia (RISA)
list, which had been done in violation of its own charter, they all looked the
other way.

A recent example. In 2014, I read a paper on the
Rg-Vedic seer Vasishtha and his relative divinization in a panel on
“divinization” at the European Conference for South Asia Studies in Zürich. My
paper was enthusiastically received, also by the panel’s organizers when I sent
in the final version for publication. First they accepted it, but then, I received an embarrassed
e-mail from the organizers stating that they could not include my paper,
without any reason given. Upon my enquiring, the half-line reply said that it
did not fit their project. In all its insignificance, this still managed to be a
blatant lie, and their earlier acceptance confirmed that this could not have been
the reason. But some higher up had warned them that I am to be treated as
excluded, just like on many other occasions.

Far more
seriously, both in America and in India, scholars suspected of pro-Hindu
sympathies are blocked in their access to academe, and their work gets studiously
ignored. For India, a tip of the blanket over this hushed-up phenomenon was
lifted by Dr. A. Devahuti: Bias in Indian
Historiography (1980). It is seriously in need of an update, but I am given
to understand that one is forthcoming. For America, a start was made by Rajiv
Malhotra with his books Invading the
Sacred (2007) and Academic
Hinduphobia (2016).

Hinduphobia

Coming to contents, Truschke accuses “Hindu
Right-wingers” of attacks on “academics”. I would have expected them to attack
“anti-Hindu Left-wingers”, and indeed I learn that this is exactly how they see
it,-- and how they see her. If she doesn’t like being characterized this way,
she is herewith invited to stop calling her adversaries similar names. The
binary Left/Right is at least problematic here, yet for a quarter century I
have seen this scheme used to explain matters. Except
that the Left doesn’t call itself Left: it treats itself as the natural centre,
and anything to its right is deemed politically coloured: “Right” or very
easily “extreme Right”.

Anyway, she calls “alleged Hinduphobia”
nothing more than “a strawman stand-in for any idea that undercuts Hindutva
ideology”. The term was made popular by Rajiv Malhotra, whom I have never known
to swear by “Hindutva”, a specific term literally translated as “Hindu-ness”
but now effectively meaning “the RSS tradition of Hindu Nationalism”. At any
rate, one does not have to follow Hindutva, or even be a Hindu or an Indian, to
observe that American India-watchers utter a strong anti-Hindu prejudice in
their publications. Not to look too far, I can find an example in myself: I
have written a number of publications criticizing both Hindutva as an ideology
and the Hindutva organizations, yet I can off-hand enumerate dozens of illustrations
of Hindu-baiting by supposed India experts in the West as well as by their
Indian counterparts.

At most, one can critize the term
“Hinduphobia” for being etymologically less than exact. Words in -phobia normally indicate an irrational
fear, and fear is not the attitude in which Hinduism is approached. The term
was coined on the model of Islamophobia,
a weaponized word meant to provoke hatred, yet now a thoroughly accepted and
integrated term among progressive academics. A -phobia is normally a psychiatric term
and its use to denote political adversaries is of a kind with the Soviet custom
of locking up dissidents in mental hospitals. And indeed, people shielding
Islam from proper enquiry do treat their opponents as mentally warped
marginals. But the core of truth in the reprehensible term “Islamophobia” is at
least that it points to “fear of Islam”, a religion which its critics do indeed
diagnose as fearsome. Hinduism, by contrast, has been criticized as cruel,
evil, superstitious, ridiculous, but not as a threat. It is only Hindus who
flatter themselves that the “Abrahamics” want to destroy Hinduism because they fear it as being superior and more
attractive.

The use
of the term Hinduphobia is predicated
upon the already existing acceptance and use of the term Islamophobia. If the UN, the governments of the US and EU etc., and
the pan-Islamic pressure group OIC, were to give up this ugly and vicious term,
then the Hinduphobia term so disliked
by Truschke would lapse with it and get replaced again by the older and more
accurate term Hindu-baiting. But
until then, it throws the Islamophile and Hindu-baiting scholars of Truschke’s
persuasion back on the bare fact that they themselves have and display the kind
of prejudice against Hinduism of which they accuse the Islam critics.

History

According
to Truschke, “a toxic combination of two realities fuel the Hindu Right’s
onslaught against scholars of South Asia: Hindu nationalist ideology rests
heavily on a specific vision of Indian history, and that version of history is
transparently false.”

Now it
gets interesting, with two competing views of Indian history, one true and one
false: “Hindu nationalists claim that India’s past featured the glorious
flourishing of a narrowly defined Hinduism that was savagely interrupted by
anybody non-Hindu, especially Muslims. However, the real story of Indian
history is much more complicated and interesting.”

A
“narrowly defined Hinduism” is only projected into the Hindu past by
semi-literate non-historians who do indeed man the middle ranks of the
uniformed RSS. No serious Hindu historian, not the lamented Jadunath Sarkar, RC
Majumdar, Harsh Narain or KS Lal, nor contempory scholars like Bharat Gupt or
Meenakshi Jain, would be foolish enough to simply deny the “diversity and
syncretism” that Truschke sees in India’s past. But here again, we see how
Truschke has chosen not to address the scholars of a competing persuasion, but
the village bumpkins.

In one
sense, however, even the most sophisticated historians will affirm that India’s
past was indeed “glorious”. And it was not at all “complicated”: India was
simply independent. Yes, ancient
India had its problems too, it had local wars, it was not paradise on earth,
but in one decisive respect, Indians under Muslim or British occupation correctly
remembered it as “glorious”: it ruled itself. When the British told Mahatma
Gandhi that his hoped-for independence would only throw India back into its
headaches of casteism, communalism and the rest, he aswered that India would of
course have its problems, “but they will be our own”. Compared to being under
foreign tutelage, such self-rule is nothing less than glorious.

This
brings us to Truschke’s own field of research: “Especially problematic for
Hindu nationalists is current scholarship on Indo-Islamic rule, a fertile
period for cross-cultural contacts and interreligious exchanges. This vibrant
past is rightly a source of pride and inspiration for many Indians, but the Hindu
Right sees only an inconvenient challenge to their monolithic narrative of
Hindu civilisation under Islamic siege.”

Note how
two issues are artfully mixed up here: the questionable monolithic view of
Hinduism and the very correct view of a Hindu civilization besieged and raped
by Islam. It is true that non-historian “Hindu nationalists” are rather
inaccurate in their “monolithic narrative of Hindu civilisation”; but it is not
true that the period of “Indo-Islamic rule” is a “source of pride and
inspiration”, nor that it is contested only by “Hindu nationalists”. Her notion
of “current scholarship” is of course limited to her own school of thought,
heavily overrepresented in academe, partly due to its aggressive policy of
exclusion vis-à-vis others.

There
are admittedly those who identify with foreign colonizers: many Indian Muslims
identify with Mohammed bin Qasim and with the Moghuls (whom Pakistan considers
as the real founders of their Indo-Islamic state), and many Nehruvian
secularists share and continue the British opinions about India and Hinduism.
But those who identify with India, even if they admit some good aspects of
these colonizations, do not take any pride at all in having been subjugated.
Yes, there were instances of collaboration with the colonizers, such as the
hundreds of thousands of Indians whose sweat made the “British” railway network
possible, or the Rajputs whose daughters filled the Moghul harems in exchange
for their fathers’ careers in the Moghul army. But those instances are at most
understandable, a lesser evil in difficult circumstances, but not a source of
“pride and inspiration”.

A few episodes of Muslim occupation were
indeed “vibrant”, viz. after Akbar’s realistic appreciations of the existing
power equations persuaded him to rule with rather than against his Hindu
subjects. Then, as everybody already knew, Hindus did indeed give their cultural
best, rebuilding the temples which the Sultanate has demolished (and which
would again be demolished by Aurangzeb),-- a tribute to the vitality of Hindu
civilization even under adverse circumstances. And some
Muslims did indeed engage in “interreligious exchanges”, such as Dara Shikoh
translating the Upanishads into Persian; later, he was beheaded for apostasy.

But even
then, academics had better use their critical sense when interpreting these
episodes, rather than piously taking them at face value. In the Zürich
conference already mentioned, I heard an “academic” describe how contemporary
Hindi writers praised Aurangzeb, the dispenser of their destinies. Well, many
eulogies of Stalin can also be cited, including by comrades fallen from grace
and praising Stalin even during their acceptance speeches of the death penalty;
but it would be a very bad historian, even if sporting academic titles, who
flatly deduces therefrom that Stalin a benign ruler. Govind Singh’s “Victory
Letter” to Emperor Aurangzeb was, in all seriousness, included among the
sources of praise, leaving unmentioned that Aurangzeb had murdered Govind’s
father and four sons. Every village bumpkin can deduce that Govind hated
Aurangezb more than any other person in the world, and that he was only being
diplomatic in his writing because of the power equation. Academics laugh at
kooks who believe in aliens, but it took an academic, no less, to discover an
alien who actually admired the murderer of his father and sons.

According
to Truschke’s admission, a lot of Hindus are “happy to underscore the violence
and bloodshed unleashed by many Indo-Islamic rulers”, but she wrongly
identifies them as “Hindu Right”. It doesn’t require a specific ideological
commitment nor even any religious identity to observe well-documented
historical facts. Mostly documented by the Muslim perpetrators themselves, that
is. Thus, like Truschke herself, I am neither Hindu nor Indian, yet I can read
for myself with what explicit glee the Muslim chroniclers described temple
destructions and massacres of Unbelievers.

The mistake of plagiarism

“In
contrast to the detailed work of academics, the Hindu nationalist vision of
India’s past stands on precarious to non-existent historical evidence. As a
result, the Hindu Right cannot engage with Indologists on scholarly grounds.
Indeed, the few Hindutva ideologues who have attempted to produce scholarship
are typically tripped up by rookie mistakes—such as misusing evidence,
plagiarism, and overly broad arguments—and so find themselves ignored by the
academic community.”

The
inclusion of “plagiarism” among her list of “rookie mistakes” gives away that
she is fulminating specifically against the work of Rajiv Malhotra, whom she is
careful not to mention by name. For his book Indra’s Net, he was famously accused of plagiarism (by a mission
mentor), for he quotes the American scholar Andrew Nicholson’s book Unifying Hinduism, in which he concurs
with the same position that Hinduism had elaborated its common doctrinal
backbone long before the Orientalists “invented Hinduism”. In fact, he only
used Nicholson as a source to prove that Westerners too could acquire this
insight, there was nothing “Hindu nationalist” about it. And he amply quoted
him in so many words, though a few times, for the flow of the narrative, he
merely rephrased the theses of this much-quoted author. By that standard, most
papers contain plagiarism; but what passes unnoticed elsewhere becomes a
scandal when done by a self-identifying Hindu.

Yet,
numerous Indologists started a holier-than-thou tirade against the
“plagiarism”, a comical drama to watch. Malhotra then walked the extra mile
writing Nicholson out of his narrative and quoting original sources instead
(thereby incidentally showing the amount of plagiarism that Nicholson himself
had committed, though no Indologist ever remarked on that). But this
inconvenient development was given the silent treatment, and Truschke still
presupposes that there ever was a substantive “plagiarism” case against
Malhotra, and by extension against the whole “Hindu Right”.

Malhotra
has indeed been “ignored by the academic community”—until he found the way to
make his critique non-ignorable. That indeed shows a lot of skill in dealing
with the way of the world, for until then, Hindus had only painstakingly proven
themselves right and the “academics” wrong, but had had no impact at all. By
contrast, Malhotra, by personalizing his argument into specific dissections of
the work of leading scholars such as Wendy Doniger, Sheldon Pollock or
Anantanand Rambachan, has earned a session at the annual conference of the
trend-setting American Academy of Religion. On Indological discussion forums,
his input is frequently mentioned, though the academics mostly keep up their
airs of pooh-poohing that interloper, in a bid to justify their ignoring his
actual critique of their own work.

By the way, notice my term: a
“self-identifying Hindu”. As the case of Malhotra has amply exemplified, it
suffices to stand up as a Hindu, or to own up Hinduism, in order to be dubbed
“Hindu Rightist”, “Hindutva ideologue”, as well as “fanatic”. “rookie” and all
the fair names Hindus have been called by Prof. Truschke’s august school of
thought. To them, the acceptable Hindu, or what Malhotra calls a “sepoy”, is one
who never identifies as a Hindu, but rather as “Indian” (or better, “Bengali”,
“Malayali” etc.), “low-caste”, and ideologically “secularist”. The exception is
when countering criticism from self-identified Hindus, for then, he is expected
to say: “But me too, I am a Hindu!” That way, he can fulfil his main task: as
long as there are Hindus, he must deny them the right to speak on behalf of
Hinduism and to give it a presence at the conversation between worldviews.

History debates

Most
Hindu scholars had or have not found the way to impose their viewpoint on the
sphere of discourse yet. In the case of objective scholars among non-Hindus,
this would not have mattered. It is, after all, their own job to trace any
material relevant to their field of research, including obscure works by other
scholars, even adversaries. But in this case, there are some cornerstones of
the Indological worldview which tolerate no criticism nor alternatives, so
these are to be carefully ignored.

Thus,
Shrikant Talageri’s case against the Aryan Invasion Theory, the bedrock of the
“academic” view of ancient Hindu history, is painstaking, detailed, voluminous,
factual and well-formulated, yet Truschke’s own entire tribe of “academics”
simply goes on ignoring his case without bothering to refute it. (Well, there
are two articles talking down to him, but we mean actual refutations, not mere
denials.) If academics were to live up to the reputation they have among
laymen, they would have set aside their current business to deal with this
fundamental challenge to their worldview.

Or take A
Secular Agenda by Arun Shourie, PhD from Syracure NY and stunningly
successful Disinvestment Minister in the AB Vajpayee Government, when India scored
its highest economic growth figures. It was a very important book, and it left
no stone standing of the common assumption among so-called experts that India
(with its religion-based civil codes and its discriminatory laws against
Hinduism) is a secular state, i.e. a state in which all citizens are equal
before the law, regardless of their religion. Though the book deconstructs the
bedrock on which the “experts” have built their view of modern India, they have
never formulated a refutation. Instead, they just keep on repeating their own deluded
assumption, as in: “The BJP threatens India’s structure as a secular state.” (Actually,
the BJP does not, and India is not.) They can do so because they are secure in
the knowledge that, among the audiences that matter, their camp controls the
sphere of discourse. Concerning the interface between religion and modern politics,
the established “academic” view is not just defective, it is an outrageous
failure.

Or
consider historian Prof. KS Lal’s works on caste and religion, refuting with
primary data the seeming truism, launched by the Communist Party ideologue MN
Roy and now omnipresent in the textbooks, that the lowest castes converted en masse to Islam because of its claimed
message of equality. Islam mainly won over the urban middle castes (and not
because of eguality, a value rejected as ingratitude towards the Dispenser of
destinies in the Quran, but because of the privileges vis-à-vis non-Muslims),
not the Untouchables. Again, the silent treatment has been the only response
the “experts” could muster.

The Ayodhya affair

It is
uncommon for Audrey Truschke and the opposite school to have any kind of direct
debate at all. In the US this was, until Rajiv Malhotra, unthinkable for lack
of any pro-Hindu school willing and able to stand up to the overwhelming
anti-Hindu bias among those Indologists willing to wade into any controversial
subject. But in India, there have been a few such confrontations. And on those
occasions, the “academics” did not cover themselves with glory.

One consequential
instance in India was the Ayodhya scholars’ debate in the winter of 1990-1991,
organized by the Janata (Left-populist) government headed by Chandra Shekhar.
This was won hands down by the scholars affirming the existence of a Hindu
temple underneath the Babri Masjid, first against a delegation of Muslim
leaders unfamiliar with historical methodology, selected by the Babri Masjid
Action Committee, then against a group of Marxist academics called in by that
same Committee for saving the day. The latter’s position was but an elaboration
of the official orthodoxy created by a group of academics from JNU when they issued
a statement, The Political Abuse of
History (1989), denying the existence of temple remains underneath the
Babri Masjid. It had been taken over as Gospel truth by most of the academic
and journalistic India-watchers in the West, including Truschke’s mentors. They
kept the lid on the debate’s outcome.

More detail
about the controversy can be found in my paper The Three Ayodhya Debates (2011). But since I do not hold an
academic chair, she might not take me serious, so let that pass. Instead, I may
refer her to the excellent book Rama’s
Ayodhya (2013) by Prof. Meenakshi Jain of DU. No Indian or Western academic
has refuted it or even formally taken cognizance of it. After Court-ordered
excavations in 2003 had definitively confirmed the existence of the temple,
acknowledged in the Court verdict of 2010, they have all turned conspicuously silent
on Ayodhya.

Indeed, what insiders knew all along, has now become
official: the stance of the “academics”, both Indian and Western, has been an
outrageous failure. It relied entirely on the authority of a few “experts”
already known for their anti-Hindu positions. Their “expertise” fell through
completely once they were cross-examined on the witness stand, as amply
documented byProf. Jain.

That those
“experts” didn’t manage to uphold their case against the temple was a surprise
only to their dupes, including the American India-watchers. At least, I assume
these were dupes and had genuinely swallowed the no-temple claim (“concocted by
the wily Hindu fundamentalists”). The alternative is that they were deliberate accomplices
in the Ayodhya deception, an artificial controversy that killed thousands and
brought down several governments. I would prefer not to think such things about
scholars like Audrey Truschke and her mentors.

A remarkable
aspect of the experts’ fall from grace was the smugness with which they took
the witness stand. They had not deemed it necessary to brush up their knowledge
of Ayodhya, or to give their ill-founded statements of opinion a more solid
basis at least after the fact. They had for so long publicly pretended, as
Truschke now does, that the Hindu side merely consisted of a bunch of deplorables,
that they didn’t see the need to gear up for the confrontation.

Iconoclasm

The Ayodhya
controversy was part of a larger issue, viz. Islamic iconoclasm, which
victimized many thousands of places of worship in India and abroad, starting
with Arabia. Or at least, that is how historians like Sita Ram Goel and Profs.
Harsh Narain, KS Lal, Saradindu Mukherji saw it: turn this one controversy into
an occasion for educating the public about the ideological causes of the
iconoclasm that hit Hindu society so hard and so consistently for over a
millennium. But the RSS-BJP preferred to put the entire focus on their one toy
in Ayodhya, and obscure or even deny the Islamic motive behind it. (The ideological
impotence and non-interest on their part provides yet another contrast with
the academics’ imaginary construction of a wily, resourceful and highly
motivated Hindu movement.)

As part of his
effort, Goel published a two-volume book giving a list of two thousand
purposely demolished temples, mostly replaced by mosques. The part on the
theology of iconoclasm proved irrefutable, and has never even been gainsaid on
any of its specifics. The list of two thousand temples equally stands entirely unshaken,
as so many challenges to the reigning school that tries to downplay the
tradition of iconoclasm pioneered by the Prophet. Ever since, the dominant
policy has been to disregard Goel’s work and carry on whitewashing the record
of Islam regardless.

Since stray
new proofs of Muslim temple destruction keep popping up, that school has
developed an alternative discursive strategy to prevent such cases from
suggesting their own logical conclusion. It now preaches that a few temple destructions
have indeed taken place, but channels this admission towards a counterintuitive
explanation: that Hinduism is to be blamed for these, not Islam. The core of
truth is that a handful of cases have been documented of ancient Hindu kings
abducting prestigious idols from their adversaries’ main temples, just as
happened in Mesopotamia and other Pagan cultures. These are then presented as
the source of inspiration for Aurangzeb’s wholesale destruction (documented in
his own court chronicles) of thousands of temples and many more idols.

Not that any
of the many Muslim iconoclasts ever testified that such was his inspiration.
Their motivation, whenever explicitly stated, and whether inside or outside of
India, is invariably purely Islamic. Since the negationist school is unable to
document its thesis, let me show them by example how to do it.

Kashinath
Pandit’s book A Muslim Missionary in
Mediaeval Kashmir (Delhi 2009) contains a translation of the Tohfatu’l Ahbab, the biography of the
15th-century Islamic missionary Shamsu’d-Din Araki by his younger contemporary
Muhammad Ali Kashmiri. After describing the many temple demolitions Araki
wrought or triggered in thinly populated Kashmir (many more than the “eighty”
which the secularists are willing to concede on Richard Eaton’s authority for
all of India during the whole Muslim period), the biographer gives Araki’s
motivation in practising all this iconoclasm.

Does he say:
“Araki then recalled the story how a Hindu king ran off with an idol and
thereby felt an urge to do something entirely different: destroy all the idols
and their idol-houses with it”? No, he recounts the standard Islamic narrative
of the Kaaba: it was built by Adam and rebuilt by Abraham for monotheistic
worship (thus yielding a far more authoritave precedent than idol theft by an
Infidel king), until unbelievers made it “a place for the idols and a house for
the statues. Some Quraish chieftains (…) turned this House of God into the
abode of devilish and satanic people. For innumerable years, this house of
divine light and bliss became the worshiping place for sorcerers and depraved
people and the centre of worshippers of idols (made of stones).”

Fortunately,
this injustice didn’t last, neither in Mecca nor in Kashmir: “When the last of
the prophets (Muhammad) saw this situation, he lifted Imam ‘Ali Murtaza on his
shoulders so that defiled and impure idols and images were struck down in the
House of God. (…) In the same manner, Kashmir was a den of wicked people, the
source of infidelity and a mine of corruption and aberration.” (p.258)

And then the
enumeration of Hindu sacred places levelled and mosques built in their stead
resumes. An extra detail of interest for all those who idealize Sufis is that
the text lists many occasions when “Sufis” and “Derwishes” participated in
massacres and temple demolitions.

At any rate,
that is what a Muslim testimony of the motive for temple destructions looks
like. At least in the real world, not in the make-believe world of our
“academics”. I had already challenged Richard Eaton (the originator of this
thesis, a self-described Marxist) and his followers to come up with such
evidence in 1999, but nothing has ever materialized. Come on, Prof. Truschke,
you can make an excellent career move by producing this proof.

To sum up:
on the one hand, we have Islamic icononoclasts and their contemporary
supporters saying in so many words that Islam made them do it. Moderns who
highlight this evidence are, in Truschke’s estimation, “bullies”. On the other,
we have no evidence at all for the claim that the Islamic iconoclasts, intent
on destroying Hinduism itself through its icons, took inspiration from Hindu
icon-stealers, who installed the icon in their own temple for continued worship
(as if abduction, wanting to have
something close to you, were the same thing as murder, i.e. wanting something
to disappear from this world). This claim is nothing more than special
pleading. Yet, people who propagate it are, in Truschke’s description,
“academics”.

Conclusion

The
bourgeoisie sets great store by status. Scholars go by a different criterion:
knowledge. They know, through learning or personal experience, that for some of
the great insights and discoveries we are indebted to outsiders and amateurs;
and that quite a few of their colleagues have big titles and positions not
corresponding to their actual knowledge. They also know that holding (or at
least uttering) the required opinions can make or break an academic career:
either formally, as when a non-Anglican could not get admission to Oxford
University, or informally, as under the reign of progressivist conformism
today.

To think
highly of the academic world presupposes a link between scientific achievement
and academic rank, and this largely makes sense in the exact sciences. In the humanities,
especially in the social “science” and literature departments, this link is
also deduced, but only as a parasitical extension of the conventions in the
exact sciences. Much of what passes for scholarship these days is only ideology
wrapped into jargon. Some sophomores take it seriously: having just gained
entry into the academic world, they idealize it and are proud of their
belonging to a higher world distinct from lay society. And most laymen believe
it: over-awed by status, they assume that academic status presupposes both
knowledge and objectivity, the basis of academic authority.

There exists a test for objective knowledge: a good
theory predicts. Physicists who know the relevant parameters of an object in
motion, can predict its location at future times. Well, how about the
predictions by the academic India-watchers? In the mid-1990s, when the BJP’s
imminent coming to power was a much-discussed probability, top academics
predicted that a BJP government would turn India into a Vedic dictatorship,
whatever that may be. They were put in the wrong even swifter than expected: in
1996, BJP leader AB Vajpayee was Prime Minister for 13 days, then lost the vote
of confidence, and instead of seizing power for good, he meekly stepped down.
Academics predicted the victimization of Dalits and women, gas chambers, “all
the Indian Muslims thrown into the Indian Ocean”, and what not. Well, the BJP
has been in power from 1998 till 2004, and since 2014: where are those gas
chambers?

Scholars of
modern India, as well as historians of fields relevant for contemporary
political debates, have a lot to be modest about. They may have academic
positions, but their record is not such that they are in a position to talk
down to outsiders, the way Audrey Truschke now does.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

(Now that the Annual Conference of the American Academy of Religion is only a few days away, let me present the abstract plus explanation I sent in for last year's conference. It was written in February 2015 and draws attention to an important phenomenon with a strong and hitherto unrefuted predictive power, viz. the BJP variety of secularism. The AAR's "experts" were not interested, preferring their prestigious delusions to the hard facts.)

AB Vajpayee's NDA Government (1998-2004)
heavily disappointed the experts who had predicted "all Moslims into the
Indian Ocean" or similar doomsday scenarios -- or rather, it put them
squarely in the wrong. Hindu "fascism" as a threat to democracy? When
Vajpayee narrowly lost a confidence vote, he meekly stepped down. War against
Pakistan? Though Pakistan unilaterally invaded India (Kargil 1999), Vajpayee
forbade the Army to strike at the invaders' base across the border, and later
opened a peace process, making symbolic concessions which Congress had always
refused. Isolationism? He threw the Indian media market open to foreign media
ownership, a move opposed by India's entire political spectrum. The only
"Hindutva" thing the NDA ever did was HRD Minister MM Joshi's clumsy
overhaul of the recommended history schoolbooks, changing nothing dramatic and
easily reversed. When the Government created a Chair for Indic Studies in
Oxford ("saffronization!"), it selected an outspoken opponent for the
job, in the vain hope of receiving a pat on the back from its declared enemies.

With the hindsight knowledge of historical
reality, it would be embarrassing to reproduce the predictions by Indian and
foreign experts. Today, anti-BJP discourse is less shrill, but still
confidently classifies the BJP among the "Hindu Right". This implies
a prediction that once in power, the BJP would pursue distinctly pro-Hindu
policies. However, in the light of our experience with the Vajpayee Government,
it is no surprise that the present Government led by Narendra Modi fails to
live up to this learned prediction, at least for now. (Of course, this paper
will be updated by November as new developments take place.)

In spite of having a more homogeneous
majority, it is reluctant to do anything pro-Hindu or perceivable as
anti-minority. On the contrary, one of its first acts was to decree a new
subsidy to Islamic schools. The stray Hindutva statements by loose cannon
(Akshay Maharaj, Jyoti Niranjan) were followed by retractions, condemnations by
Government spokesmen, and indignant innuendos by Modi-friendly journalists
(Tavleen Singh, Swapan Dasgupta). Public reconversions by the allied VHP,
heavily publicized and demonized by the media, were promptly discouraged by the
Government. Having learned from Vajpayee's 2004 defeat, though, Modi does “keep
the pot boiling”, does regularly throw crumbs of inconsequential Hindu
symbolism to his support base, all while not formally changing anything.

However, if many BJP workers are
disappointed with this Government, is not for what it does but mainly for what
it persistently fails to do. Thus, it inducted no figures with a strongly
ideological profile (Arun Shourie, Subramanian Swamy). Likewise, some public
figures who had crossed the floor (e.g. Madhu Kishwar) were conspicuously not
rewarded -- a fact not considered here for disgruntled ego reasons but for
illustrating the BJP's lack of strategy: it doesn't put people who have
actually sacrificed for the BJP to any use, while awarding positions of
influence to unreliable newcomers motivated by sheer opportunism. While some
things on the Hindu agenda are either useless to Hinduism (e.g. declaring a
"Hindu Rashtra") and others would arouse violent protests for which
the media are sure to blame Modi (e.g. a Common Civil Code, though
"secular" par excellence), others are perfectly feasible and,
moreover, turn out to be the most consequential for the flourishing of
Hinduism.

In particular, the amending of
Constitutional Articles 28 and 30, which (de facto c.q. formally) discriminate
against Hinduism in education, does not take away any rights from the minorities,
yet lifts an enormous burden from Hindu organizations investing in education
and eliminates a major reason for Hindu sects (Arya Samaj, RK Mission,
Lingayats, Jains) to have themselves judicially declared non-Hindu minorities.
Similarly, eliminating the legal basis of the discrimination against Hinduism
in temple management, with rich temples (but not mosques or churches)
nationalized and their income pocketed by politicians or diverted to non-Hindu
purposes, would give an enormous boost to Hindu religious and cultural life,
without impinging upon the rights of the minorities. It has to be noted,
however, and it buttresses my case for "BJP secularism", that temple
management is partly a competence of the States, and that BJP State Governments
have not made the difference. At any rate, there are meaningful things a BJP
Government could do specifically for Hinduism without endangering its
non-religious agenda (development, cleaning India etc.) or its international
standing, yet it chooses not to do them.

As for the Hindutva fits and starts of some
BJP members, now considered extremists but in fact only representative of what
the erstwhile Jan Sangh (1952-77, predecessor of the BJP) stood for, it should
be easy to bring them in line around a more reasonable but still credibly
pro-Hindu programme. It is here that the BJP is most conspicuously failing --
conspicuous at least to insiders, for 99% of the outside literature about the
BJP never mentions this phenomenon. Contrary to a consensus among academic and
journalistic India-watchers, the supposed “Hindu extremist” party has no Hindu
agenda. It relies on pro-Hindu workers to do the campaigning legwork, but once
in power it cold-shoulders them, it publicizes and pursues an agenda of
economic development only, and it tries to curry favour with the secularists.

The main reason is the long-standing
deliberate lack of investment (pioneered by MS Golwalkar) in an intellectual
and strategic vision of its own, the spurning of any analysis of the forces in
the field and of the potential and limitations of the situation. It therefore
also lacks competent personnel for the ideological struggle, e.g. for a
textbook overhaul or, now, for nominating politically friendly new
Vice-Chancellors. Consequently, most BJP leaders have an enormous inferiority
complex vis-à-vis the secularists and, even when in office, try to live up to
the norms laid down by their opponents.

This is hardly the impression created by
most experts; but the primary data, the only source to which this paper pledges
loyalty, tell a clear story: the present BJP is only termed a Hindu party in
deference to the distant memory of its initial orientation.

Abstract

Like the previous BJP Government, the
present one fails to live up to the oft-heard predictions of strident pro-Hindu
and anti-minority policies. This is due to a phenomenon insufficiently realized
by most India-watchers: a desire to live up to the norms upheld by the
secularists and an interiorization of the disinterest in "outdated"
Hindu concerns, not just among the numerous opportunists who have flocked to
the new party in power, but even in the loyal core of the BJP's personnel.
Based on insider sources, this paper enumerates the data establishing the
reality of "BJP secularism" and analyses the reasons for this
emerging phenomenon.

Saturday, November 5, 2016

(After Hindu activists demolished a
mosque in a small town in Rajasthan, the on-line magazine OutlookIndia published
a comment with an entirely predictable message by the well-known secularist
Yoginder Sikand. At the editor's invitation, I wrote the following rebuttal, published on
31 August 2001.)

In his article "Sanctified Vandalism As A Political
Tool"
(www.OutLooklndia.com, Aug. 23, 2001), Yoginder Sikand tries to explain away
Muslim iconoclasm as marginal and uncharacteristic, all while accusing the Hindus and others of just such iconoclasm. In
both endeavours, he predictably relies on Richard Eatons book Essays on Islam and Indian
History (OUP Delhi 2000).

According to Sikand, Eaton clearly shows that cases of
destruction of places of worship were not restricted to Muslim rulers
alone. He recounts numerous instances of Hindu kings having torn down
Hindu temples, in addition to Jaina and Buddhist shrines. He says that
these must be seen as, above all, powerful politically symbolic acts. Follows a list of such allegations
against historical Hindu kings.

As it takes at least a page to
evaluate or refute an allegation uttered in a single sentence, I cannot discuss
those allegations here, so I will accept for the sake of argument that there
have indeed been instances
of Hindu kings looting Hindu idols and destroying Hindu temples for political
purposes.
However, it is obvious that these do not create Sikand's desired impression of symmetry
between Hindu and Muslim iconoclasm. Such symmetry would require that
like Hindu kings, whose goal was political rather than religious, Muslim kings
also destroyed places of worship of their own religion. Eaton and Sikand
would succeed in blurring the contrast between Hindu and Muslim attitudes to
places of worship if they could present a sizable list of mosques
destroyed by Muslim conquerors.

In a further attempt to blame even
Islamic iconoclasm on the alleged Hindu example, Sikand quotes Eaton again: It is clear that temples had been
the natural sites for the contestation of kingly authority well before the
coming of Muslim Turks to India. Not surprisingly, Turkish invaders, when
attempting to plant their own rule in early medieval India, followed and
continued established patterns. How strange then that the Muslim records never invoke the
Hindu example: invariably they cite Islamic scripture and precedent as
justification for desecrating Pagan temples. As we shall see, the
justification was provided outside of the Hindu sphere of influence in
7th-century Arabia.

But at least Sikand admits the fact
of Islamic iconoclasm: It
is true that, as the historical records show, some Muslim kings did indeed
destroy Hindu temples. This even Muslims themselves would hardly dispute. However, Sikand claims that unnamed
Hindutva
sources
have grossly exaggerated the record of Islamic temple destruction: Richard Eaton points out that of the
sixty thousand-odd cases of temple destruction by Muslim rulers cited by
contemporary Hindutva sources one may identify only eighty instances whose historicity appears to be
reasonably certain.

In his seminal book Hindu
Temples: What Happened to Them, independent Hindu historian Sita Ram Goel
has listed two thousand cases where a mosque was built in forcible replacement
of a Hindu temple. Not one of these verifiable items has been proven
false, not by Sikand nor by Eaton or other eminent historians. It is also
instructive to see for oneself what Eaton's purported eighty
cases are, on pp. 128-132 of his book. These turn out not to concern
individual places of worship, but campaigns of destruction affecting whole
cities with numerous temples at once. Among the items on Eaton's list, we find Delhi under Mohammed Ghori's onslaught, 1193, or Benares under the Ghurid conquest, 1194, and again under Aurangzeb's temple-destruction campaign, 1669.
On each of these three occasions, literally hundreds of
temples were sacked. In the case of Delhi, we all know how the single Quwwat-ul-Islam
mosque replaced 27 temples, incorporating their rubble. At this rate,
Eaton's
eighty instances easily match Goel's two thousand, perhaps even the
unnamed Hindutva author's
sixty
thousand.

Sikand continues with the oft-used
argument: Caution
must be exercised in accepting the narratives provided by medieval writers
about the exploits of kings, including their feats
of temple destruction. Most historians were employees of the royal
courts, and they tended to exaggerate the exploits of the kings in order to present them as great champions of
Islam, an image that hardly fits the facts that we know about them. So, as Sikand admits in so many
words, the Muslim chroniclers were collectively convinced that they could
enhance the standing of their patrons as champions of Islam by attributing to them feats of temple destruction. Perhaps some of them were liars, as Sikand alleges,
and merely attributed these feats of temple destruction to kings who had no
such merit. But fact is: all of them, liars as well as truth-tellers,
acted on the collectively accepted premise that a good Muslim ruler is one who
extirpates idolatry including its material places and objects of worship.
They all believed that Islam justifies and requires the destruction of idol
temples. And rest assured that, like the Taliban, they had received a far
more thorough training in Islamic theology than Eaton or Sikand.

In a further attempt to minimize
Muslim iconoclasm, Sikand claims: As in the case of Hindu rulers attacks on temples, Eaton says that almost all instances of
Muslim rulers destroying Hindu shrines were recorded in the wake of their
capture of enemy territory. Once these territories were fully integrated
into their dominions, few temples were targetted. This itself clearly
shows that these acts were motivated, above all, by political concerns and not
by a religious impulse to extirpate idolatry.

In fact, there were plenty of cases
of temple destruction unrelated to conquest, the best-known being Aurangzebs razing of thousands of temples
which his predecessors had allowed to come up. But I concede that stable
Muslim kingdoms often allowed less prominent temples to function, most openly
the Moghul empire from Akbar to Shah Jahan. This was precisely because
they could only achieve stability by making a compromise with the majority
population.

Islamic clerics could preach all
they wanted about Islamic purity and the extirpation of idolatry, but rulers
had to face battlefield realities (apart from being constrained by the
never-ending faction fights within the Muslim elite) and were forced to
understand that they could not afford to provoke Hindus too far.

Akbar's genius consisted in enlisting enough Hindu support or
acquiescence to maintain a stable Muslim empire. After Aurangzeb broke
Akbar's
compromise, the Moghul empire started falling apart under the pressure of the
Maratha, Jat, Rajput and Sikh rebellions, thus proving the need for compromise
a contrario.

In order to justify this compromise
theologically, the zimma system originally designed for Christians and
Jews (but excluding polytheists, a category comprising Hindus) was adapted to
Indian conditions. This zimma or "charter of toleration" implied the imposition of a number of humiliating constraints
on the non-Muslim subjects or zimmi-s, such as the toleration tax or
jizya, but at least it allowed them to continue practising their religion in a
discreet manner. The long-term design was to make the non-Islamic
religions die out gradually by imposing permanent incentives for conversion to
Islam, as witnessed by the slow plummeting of Christian demography in Egypt or
Syria, from over 90% in the 7th century via some 50% in the 12th century to
about 10% today. The system had the same impact in South Asia, yielding
Muslim majorities in the areas longest or most intensely under Muslim control.

To varying extents, the zimma
system could include permission to rebuild destroyed churches or temples.
But even then, non-Muslim places of worship, though tolerated in principle,
were not safe from Muslim destruction or expropriation. The Ummayad
mosque in Damascus was once a cathedral, as was the Aya Sophia in Istambul; the
Mezquita of Cordova was built in replacement of a demolished church.
Eaton and Sikand can propose their rosy scenario of Islamic iconoclasts
emulating an imaginary Hindu iconoclasm only by keeping the non-Indian part of
Muslim history out of view. It is entirely clear from the Muslim records
that these temple-destroyers consciously repeated in India what earlier Muslim
rulers had done in West Asia. The first of these rulers was the Prophet
Mohammed himself. And this brings us to the crux of Sikands argument.

When the Taliban ordered the
destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, a secularist choir assured us that this had
nothing to do with genuine
Islam.
To me it seems rather pretentious for secularists with their studied ignorance
of religions to claim better knowledge of Islam than the Taliban, the "students (of Islam)", whose mental horizon consists of
nothing but the detailed knowledge of Islamic theology and jurisprudence.
Nonetheless, Sikand repeats the exercise: "Most importantly, a distinction must be made between Islamic
commandments, on the one hand, and the acts of individual Muslims on the
other. The Quran in no way sanctions the destruction of the places of
worship of people of other faiths."

In deciding what is genuinely
Islamic and what is not, it must be borne in mind that Islamic law is very
largely based on the precedents set by the Prophet. Thus, it is lawful to
kill Rushdie because the Prophet himself had had his critics executed or
murdered. Likewise, the Taliban could justify their destruction of the
Bamiyan Buddhas with reference to Prophet's own exemplary iconoclasm. The primary Islamic
sources on the Prophet's
career (the Hadis and Sira) teach us that during his conquest of
Arabia, he did destroy all functioning temples of the Arab Pagans, as well as a
Christian church. When he was clearly winning the war, many tribes chose
to avoid humiliation and martyrdom by crossing over to his side, but he would
only allow them to join him on condition that they first destroy their
idols. The truly crucial event was Prophet's entry into the Kaaba, the central shrine of Arabia's native religion, where he and his
nephew Ali smashed the 360 idols with their own hands.

When prophet Mohammed appeared on
the scene, Arabia was a multicultural country endowed with Pagan shrines,
churches, synagogues and Zoroastrian fire-temples. When he died, all the
non-Muslims had been converted, expelled or killed, and their places of worship laid waste or turned
into mosques. As he had ordered before his death, only one religion
remained in Arabia. If we were to believe Yoginder Sikand, Mohammed's iconoclasm was non-Islamic.
In reality, Mohammed's
conduct is the definitional standard of what it is to be a good Muslim.

It is true that the Quran has little
to say on temple destruction, though it is very eloquent on Mohammed's programme of replacing all other
religions with his own (which obviously implies replacing temples with
mosques). Yet, the Quran too provides justification for the smashing of
the objects of non-Islamic worship. It claims that Abraham was the
ancestor of the Arabs through Ismail, that his father had been an idol-maker,
that he himself ordered the idols of his tribe destroyed (Q.37:93), and that he
built the Kaaba as the first mosque, free of idols. It further describes how
Abraham was rewarded for these virtuous acts. Obviously it cannot be
un-Islamic to emulate a man described by the Quran as the first Muslim and
favoured by Allah.

If Abraham existed at all, the only
source about him is the Bible, which carries none of this "information". It tells us that Ismail was
the son of Abraham's
Egyptian concubine Hagar, and that she took her son back to Egypt; Arabia is
not in the picture at all. Nor do pre-Islamic Arab inscriptions mention
Abraham, or Ismail or their purported aniconic worship in the Kaaba. The
Quranic story about them is pure myth. Considering the secularist record
on lambasting myths, I wonder why Sikand has not
bothered to pour scorn on this Quranic myth yet.

All the same, Islamic apologists
regularly. justify the desecration of the Kaaba by Prophet Mohammed as a mere
restoration of Abraham's
monotheistic mosque which had been usurped by the polytheists. This
happens to be exactly the justification given by Hindus for the demolition of
the Babri Masjid, with this difference that the preexistence of a Hindu temple
at the Babri Masjid site is a historical fact, while the preexistence of
monotheistic and aniconic worship established by Abraham at the Kaaba is pure
myth. At any rate, the Islamic account itself establishes that the model
man Prophet Mohammed desecrated the Kaaba and forcibly turned it into a mosque,
setting an example, particularly, for Mahmud Ghaznavi, Aurangzeb and the
Taliban to emulate.

Let us conclude with a comment on
Sikand's
conclusion: "Hindus
and Muslims alike, then, have been equally guilty of destroying places of worship,
and, in this regard, as in any other, neither has a monopoly of virtue or
vice. The destruction of the mosque in Rajasthan and building a temple in
its place, like the tearing down of the Babri Masjid by Hindutva zealots or the
vandalism of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban, shows how sanctified vandalism
and medieval notions of the politics of revenge are still alive and thriving in
our part of the world."

Look how claims are smuggled into
this conclusion which have not been established in Sikand's argumentation. Even by
Sikand's
own figures, Hindus and Muslims were far from "equally" guilty, as a handful of alleged cases of temple destruction
by Hindus do not equal the "eighty"
well-attested Islamic cases. Also, the notion of revenge, attributed here
to Hindus and Muslims alike, does not apply to both. The Hindu kar sevaks
in Ayodhya were arguably taking revenge for the destruction of the pre-existing
Rama Mandir, but the Islamic destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was not a case
of revenge on anyone. The Taliban or Afghan Islam in general had not been
hurt or threatened by Buddhists or by any other religion. Their
iconoclasm was not a case of vengeance, but of unilateral and unprovoked
aggression.

Nobody in this forum, or so I hope,
claims a "monopoly
of virtue"
for the members of one religion, nor that of vice for those of another.
The problem with religions is that they can make virtuous people commit vicious
acts out of innocent piety, viz. by ordaining vicious behaviour as divinely
sanctioned. In spite of Sikand's attempt to whitewash Aurangzeb, evidence remains plentiful
that this Moghul emperor committed acts of persecution and iconoclasm which
would generally be considered vicious (they certainly would if committed by
Hindutva activists, witness the torrent of abuse after the demolition of the
Babri Masjid). Yet, by all accounts, Aurangzeb was a virtuous man, not
given to self-indulgence, eager to fulfil his duties. Likewise, the
Kashmiri "militants" who massacre Hindus are not people
of evil character. They have left fairly cosy jobs or schools behind to
put their lives on the line for their ideal, viz. bringing Kashmir under
Islamic rule. It is the contents of their religion which makes
them cross the line between their own goodness and the evil of their terrorist
acts. The problem is not Muslims, the problem is Islam.

The founding texts as well as the
history of Islam testify to the profound link between iconoclasm and the basic
injunction of the Prophet, viz. that "until ye believe in Allah alone, enmity and hate shall reign
between us"
(Q.60:4), i.e. between Muslims and non-Muslims. I can understand that a
peace-loving Muslim who is comfortable with religious pluralism would have
problems with this quotation, and generally with the unpleasant record of the
founder and role model of his religion. Having wrestled with the Catholic
faith in which I grew up, I know from experience that outgrowing one's religion can be a long and painful
process. Regarding a Muslim's reluctance to face these facts, I would therefore counsel
compassion and patience.

But Yoginder Sikand doesn't have this excuse. For him as
a secularist, facing and affirming the defects of religions should come
naturally. One of the best-documented defects of any religion is the role
of Islamic doctrine in the destruction of other people's cultural treasures, rivalled only
by Christianity in some of its phases, and surpassed only in the 20th century
by Communism. A secularist should subject the record of Islam to
criticism, not to a whitewash.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.